Simion, Valenza, Macchi Cassia, Turati, and Umiltà (2002) suggested that newborns preferred "top-heavy" stimuli and such bias may account for neonatal face preference. However, convergent evidence for the discriminability between the top-heavy versus bottom-heavy patterns has not been demonstrated. We used a modified familiarization/novelty procedure (Chien, Palmer, & Teller, 2003) ...

Topál et al. (Reports, 4 September 2009, p. 1269) showed that dogs, like infants but unlike wolves, make perseverative search errors that can be explained by the use of ostensive cues from the experimenter. We suggest that a simpler learning process, local enhancement, can account for errors made by dogs.

Handedness is a developmental phenomenon that becomes distinctively identifiable during infancy. Although infant hand-use preferences sometimes have been reported as unstable, other evidence demonstrates that infant hand-use preference for apprehending objects can be reliably assessed during the second half of the infant's first year of life. The current study provides ...

ABSTRACTLexical stress is useful for a number of language learning tasks. In particular, it helps infants segment the speech stream and identify phonetic contrasts. Recent work has demonstrated that infants aged 1 ; 0 can learn two novel words differing only in their stress pattern. In the current study, we ...

Atypical attention has been proposed as a marker of the broader autism phenotype. In the present study we investigated this and the related process of inhibitory control at the youngest possible age through the study of infant siblings of children with an autism spectrum disorder (Sibs-ASD). Both attention and inhibition ...

A number of studies have examined the acoustic differences between infant-directed speech (IDS) and adult-directed speech, suggesting that the exaggerated acoustic properties of IDS might facilitate infants' language development. However, there has been little empirical investigation of the acoustic properties that infants use for word learning. The goal of this ...

Studies have revealed a preference for the left hemibody in infant holding in 65-85% of cases. Several investigations have linked this preference to maternal asymmetries. The main goal of the present study was to assess manual and hemispheric asymmetries in both mother and child and delineate their respective influence on ...

The hypothesis that vocalic categories are enhanced in infant-directed speech (IDS) has received a great deal of attention and support. In contrast, work focusing on the acoustic implementation of consonantal categories has been scarce, and positive, negative, and null results have been reported. However, interpreting this mixed evidence is complicated ...

The present study examined whether 6- and 9-month-old Caucasian infants could categorize faces according to race. In Experiment 1, infants were familiarized with different female faces from a common ethnic background (i.e. either Caucasian or Asian) and then tested with female faces from a novel race category. Nine-month-olds were able ...

Glass patterns are moirés created from a sparse random-dot field paired with its spatially shifted copy. Because discrimination of these patterns is not based on local features, they have been used extensively to study global integration processes. Here, we investigated whether 4- to 5.5-month-old infants are sensitive to the global ...

Very few experiments have studied the two item same/different relation in young human infants. This contrasts with an extensive animal literature. We tested young infants with two novel tasks designed specifically to provide convergent comparative measures. Each infant completed both tasks allowing an assessment of their understanding of the abstract ...

Previous evidence has shown that 11-month-olds represent ordinal relations between purely numerical values, whereas younger infants require a confluence of numerical and non-numerical cues. In this study, we show that when multiple featural cues (i.e., color and shape) are provided, 7-month-olds detect reversals in the ordinal direction of numerical sequences ...

Recent research has suggested consonants and vowels serve different roles during language processing. While statistical computations are preferentially made over consonants but not over vowels, simple structural generalizations are easily made over vowels but not over consonants. Nevertheless, the origins of this asymmetry are unknown. Here we tested if a ...

Bilateral regions of the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) appear to be functionally selective for both rudimentary non-symbolic number tasks and higher-level symbolic number tasks in adults and older children. Furthermore, the ability to mentally represent and manipulate approximate non-symbolic numerical quantities is present from birth. These factors leave open whether the ...

This study uses near-infrared spectroscopy in young infants in order to elucidate the nature of functional cerebral processing for speech. Previous imaging studies of infants' speech perception revealed left-lateralized responses to native language. However, it is unclear if these activations were due to language per se rather than to some ...

This paper explores the minimal representational and processing requirements for teleological and mentalistic inferences. These inferences are already present in 6- to 12-month-old infants when they judge the goals of moving agents like inanimate shapes, without any cue about human body motion. This precludes the mirror system as a potential ...

Newborn infants must rapidly adjust their physiology and behavior to the specific demands of the novel postnatal environment. This adaptation depends, at least in part, on the infant's ability to learn from experiences. We report here that infants exhibit learning even while asleep. Bioelectrical activity from face and scalp electrodes ...

To better understand how infants process complex auditory input, this study investigated whether 11-month-old infants perceive the pitch (melodic) or the phonetic (lyric) components within songs as more salient, and whether melody facilitates phonetic recognition. Using a preferential looking paradigm, uni-dimensional and multi-dimensional songs were tested; either the pitch or ...

Hand shaping is an important part of many skilled hand movements and includes a number of hand shapes prominent amongst which is collection. In collection, the hand is held with the digits lightly closed and flexed. It occurs when the hand is at rest and it occurs as the hand ...

Previous research suggests that infant speech perception reorganizes in the first year: young infants discriminate both native and non-native phonetic contrasts, but by 10-12 months difficult non-native contrasts are less discriminable whereas performance improves on native contrasts. In the current study, four experiments tested the hypothesis that, in addition to ...

Research indicates that object perception involves the decomposition of images into parts. A critical principle that governs part decomposition by adults is the short-cut rule, which states that, all else being equal, the visual system parses objects using the shortest possible cuts. We examined whether 6.5-month-olds' parsing of images also ...

Subordinate-level category-learning processes in infants were investigated with ERP and looking-time measures. ERPs were recorded while 6- to 7-month-olds were presented with Saint Bernard images during familiarization, followed by novel Saint Bernards interspersed with Beagles during test. In addition, infant looking times were measured during a paired-preference test (novel Saint ...

Phillips-Silver and Trainor (2005) demonstrated a link between movement and the metrical interpretation of rhythm patterns in 7-month-old infants. Infants bounced on every second beat of a rhythmic pattern with no auditory accents later preferred to listen to an accented version of the pattern with accents every second beat (duple ...

The ability to individuate objects is one of our most fundamental cognitive capacities. Recent research has revealed that when objects vary in color or luminance alone, infants fail to individuate those objects until 11.5 months. However, color and luminance frequently covary in the natural environment, thus providing a more salient ...

Human infants have an enormous amount to learn from others to become full-fledged members of their culture. Thus, it is important that they learn from reliable, rather than unreliable, models. In two experiments, we investigated whether 14-month-olds (a) imitate instrumental actions and (b) adopt the individual preferences of a model ...

This study investigated whether the disengagement of attention from facial expression is modulated by gaze direction in infants. To this end, we measured the saccadic reaction time required for the 10-month-olds to disengage their attention from angry and happy expressions combined with either straight or averted gaze. The 10-month-olds' disengagement ...

An imitation procedure was used to investigate the impact of demonstrator familiarity and language cues on infant learning from television. Eighteen-month-old infants watched two pre-recorded videos showing an adult demonstrating a sequence of actions with two sets of stimuli. Infants' familiarity with the demonstrator and the language used during the ...

Acoustic analysis of infant vocalizations has typically employed traditional acoustic measures drawn from adult speech acoustics, such as f(0), duration, formant frequencies, amplitude, and pitch perturbation. Here an alternative and complementary method is proposed in which data-derived spectrographic features are central. 1-s-long spectrograms of vocalizations produced by six infants recorded ...

Mature representations of number are built on a core system of numerical representation that connects to spatial representations in the form of a mental number line. The core number system is functional in early infancy, but little is known about the origins of the mapping of numbers onto space. In ...

Girls and boys differ in their preferences for toys such as dolls and trucks. These sex differences are present in infants, are seen in non-human primates, and relate, in part, to prenatal androgen exposure. This evidence of inborn influences on sex-typed toy preferences has led to suggestions that object features, ...

Humans have a unique ability to coordinate their motor movements to an external auditory stimulus, as in music-induced foot tapping or dancing. This behavior currently engages the attention of scholars across a number of disciplines. However, very little is known about its earliest manifestations. The aim of the current research ...

Human neonates prefer listening to speech compared to many nonspeech sounds, suggesting that humans are born with a bias for speech. However, neonates' preference may derive from properties of speech that are not unique but instead are shared with the vocalizations of other species. To test this, thirty neonates and ...

This study examined the developing object knowledge of infants through their visual anticipation of action targets during action observation. Infants (6, 8, 12, 14, and 16 months) and adults watched short movies of a person using 3 different everyday objects. Participants were presented with objects being brought either to a ...

Studies have reported differences between infant-directed speech (IDS) and adult-directed speech (ADS), suggesting that mothers adjust speech to their infants in ways that may help children better parse the incoming acoustical signal. One aspect of IDS that has been examined is voice onset time (VOT). Results have been inconsistent, revealing ...

Since the 1980s, research investigating the beneficial effects of exposure to maternal voice has been steadily increasing. This has been accomplished by playing back recordings of maternal voice to the preterm infants. It is not known, however, how variations in the typical NICU setting alter the sound quality of the ...

The prevailing view is that newborn phonetic perception is tabula rasa because of poor transmission of the acoustic features of phonemes to the fetus. However, vowel information may be at least intermittently clear in utero. We tested 80 neonates (M = 32.8 h old, range 7-75) in the US and ...

Several studies indicate that profoundly deaf children receiving a cochlear implant (CI) under the age of 2 years are able to develop linguistic skills at a rate equal to similarly aged children with normal hearing. CI devices deliver temporal-envelope (E) cues in speech over a small number of frequency channels. ...

Adult-directed speech (ADS) is characterized by frequent use of phonological rules such as palatalization ("did you" becomes "didju"). Use of such rules should blur word boundaries, making it more difficult for infants to identify words in the input. To date, there are conflicting data on the degree to which infant-directed ...

Speech scientists have long proposed that formant-exaggerated speech plays an important role in phonetic learning and language acquisition. However, there have been very little neurophysiological data on how the infant brain and adult brain respond to formant exaggeration in speech. We employed event-related potentials (ERPs) to investigate neural coding of ...

Role-differentiated bimanual manipulation (RDBM) is a complementary movement of both hands that requires differentiation between actions of the hands. Previous research showed that RDBM can be observed in infants as early as 7 months. However, RDBM could be considered a skill only when its frequency, duration, and use is appropriate ...

Adults experience a release of masking when the amplitude level of a masker varies [Festen and Plomp (1990) and Wilson and Carhart (1969)], especially when the variation occurs in a slow, predictable manner [Gustafsson and Arlinger (1994)]. This pattern of performance has been described as "listening in the dips" of ...

Neonates prefer human speech to other nonlinguistic auditory stimuli. However, it remains an open question whether there are any conceptual consequences of words on object categorization in infants younger than 6 months. The current study examined the influence of words and tones on object categorization in forty-six 3- to 4-month-old ...

Despite much research demonstrating infants' abilities to attribute goals to others' actions, it is unclear whether infants can generate on-line predictions about action outcomes, an ability crucial for the human propensity to cooperate and collaborate with others. This lack of evidence is mainly due to methodological limitations restricting the interpretation ...

In a series of studies, we examined how mothers naturally stress words across multiple mentions in speech to their infants and how this marking influences infants' recognition of words in fluent speech. We first collected samples of mothers' infant-directed speech using a technique that induced multiple repetitions of target words. ...